"Celebrated and marginalized, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today...... At the height of the language's American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics—at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans' votes with more familiar political orientations—and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech. In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddish's greatest triumphs—[[Isaac Bashevis Singer"